I could literally memorize all the lines of this book by now! Who wouldn’t if you are reading this book every single day with your child? My daughter just loves everything about the book ~ especially all the rhyming words, repetitive lines (which are very easy to memorize) and the sounds of each of the characters in the book which it makes it even livelier and more interactive.

This book also is a good proof of the saying “Don’t judge the book by its cover.” When I first got this book from the mail, it really didn’t interest me that much. I am not sure why but the cover, despite its vivid color and the carefully designed drawing of a house with a man on it wasn’t that appealing upon its first sight. To me, it didn’t look as if the book was interesting at all. In fact, I felt like that book would just contain like some barnyard animals and the usual word-picture identification of the animals that you could see in the barn. But, boy I was wrong!

This book is totally the opposite of my first impression. As soon as I went through the first page, the lines that slowly builds up from one incident to the next give the book a sense of interactivity. The book is also predictable in such a way that the reader would be able to instantly get the series of events as it unfolds. As the events build up, so as the characters. It’s like opening a present with the best surprise at the end of the wrapping paper!

The CD is the best part of this! All the characters that are involved in each line gives out a particular sound which is beneficial for readers who are trying to associate words to sounds and vice versa. My daughter loves it whenever the words cat, dog, rat, cow, maiden and man come up because she could then make the sound that the book initially presented! It is a nice way for her to associate these sounds and remember these to connect to a particular word.

I can honestly say that this is one of my most favorite Barefoot Books ever! It combines what I would like to see for the perfect yoga book for children – thus, this makes it the PERFECT book to introduce children to yoga. This is also a great book for teachers who would like to introduce the different occupations or work that parents do!

The Introduction part of the book is very sincere. The author Baron Baptiste really showed how caring and how dedicated he is in bringing the right kind of discipline to his children as well to other children in the form of yoga. He made yoga a more enjoyable, and not frightful to most kids by interconnecting what profession a parent has. An example of which is the page below:

In this page, the mother is a gardener…on the other hand the dad is sometimes a tree. From this, the author builds on an occupation to a yoga position that is related to the occupation of being a gardener, thus the TREE position comes up.

In this page, it guides the reader from the first step to attaining this position to the final step. What I love about this YOGA pose page is that, throughout the book the author explains as to what this particular pose teaches us in our daily lives (i.e. Tree Pose teaches us to support ourselves) and then moves to the reason why we need to learn this lesson. For the Tree Pose, “so that we can reach high and remain stable, yet be flexible.”

I love the lessons/sayings from these YOGA pose pages. Here are some of the sayings I find very inspiring, even for young children:

1. “….and as with anything practice makes progress”

2. “Triangles have 3 sides and 3 angles – just as we have 3 aspects: mind, body and spirit”

3.”If we plow well, we can sow well, and then reap the rewards of what we have planted.”

and

4. from the Fish pose…”Don’t struggle upstream, jump in and just go with the flow, even in turbulent times.”

This book also presented a lot of diversity. The parents and the children that are illustrated are of different nationalities – and the diversity of work from a gardener, to a marine biologist, to a builder and then too a baker, it is just an amazing book! And of course, these poses can be enlarged if you are a teacher wanting to teach a step-by-step way of a certain pose.